


How Could You Walk Across that Broken Bridge

by bccalling



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 06:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4695656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bccalling/pseuds/bccalling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s cold here, lonely.<br/>Dust settles thick over memories they’ve locked away so deep they’d never imagined they’d find them again.<br/>But here they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Could You Walk Across that Broken Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> I literally have no idea. I wrote this in 2010 and never posted it anywhere. It was inspired by "Broken Bridge" by Daughter Darling. I don't think I knew what this was then, either, though. Just something that came out one evening. Possibly the most random thing I've ever written.
> 
> Also, sorry about the weird formatting. I'm still working on figuring out AO3.

* * *

It’s cold here, lonely.  
Dust settles thick over memories they’ve locked away so deep they’d never imagined they’d find them again.  
But here they are.

Images paint gray walls with splashes of light.  
Years. A lifetime.  
Alight in the darkest recesses of his mind.

He never wants to leave here.

* * *

Sometimes he thinks he remembers a world built of memories. Dancing images he can never really touch drifting around him while he stares.  
It’s a world he misses.

Here, he’s never so at peace. In this life he doesn’t believe could ever truly be his.  
People walk through his world, one by one. _Adam_ , they call him. Smile, make small talk.  
This place is wrong.

He’d tried to correct one of them once. Voice had died the moment he had tried to voice a name.  
He knows _Adam_ is wrong, but can’t find the one that fits. 

* * *

He hears the name _Dean_ once.  
Turns in search of someone. Doesn’t know who.  
There’s no one. 

* * *

His mother tells him once that he needs to get help.  
He tells her she’s not his mother.  
Feels little sympathy when she locks herself away and cries through the night.

He wonders if that makes him an awful person. 

* * *

Three years of wandering aimlessly through a mess of _wrong_ , he finally finds a _right_.  
It comes in the form of a man. Young, but war torn. The man’s eyes hold a weariness his age shouldn’t possibly know. It feels a bit like looking in a mirror.  
He comes with a beautiful young woman and a boy he calls Ben.  
The woman calls the man Dean.  
And the man calls him Sam, and then looks confused. As though it had come without bidding.

But Dean’s eyes hold a spark of recognition.  
They match Sam’s. 

* * *

He doesn’t see the man again. Not for a long, long time, anyway. But he feels as though he does. Imagines he remembers moments of static images that float through his mind and feel a bit like memories.

Only, memories are something of which he knows nothing.  
He has them, of course.  
They’re not real.  
They hold together with a paper-thin strand of brittle string. One that, nevertheless, never seems to snap.  
Still, he knows, they’re wrong. 

* * *

It’s not long after his first encounter with the man— _Dean_ , he reminds himself—that he takes the name of _Sam_.  
It’s right. He feels it in every fiber of his being.  
He doesn’t know who Sam is, exactly—not sure he ever will—but he is _Sam_ , and that’s more than he’s ever known of himself. 

* * *

It’s five years later when he sees Dean again.  
He’s at his sister’s graduation. Ben sits beside her as they await their diplomas. He remembers meeting Ben a year ago, when he had been unable to avoid a family dinner at his mother’s house.  
Ben had been his sister's first boyfriend (still was, in fact, judging by the kiss he planted on her the moment they both had their respective diplomas in hand) and best friend since childhood.  
He’d never made the connection.

His sister is the only one with whom he’s ever felt at ease.  
He wonders now if that had less to do with her and more to do with her connection to _Dean_.

* * *

It’s only moments after they’re allowed off the makeshift stage that he’s being pulled away by his bubbling sister as she drags him to meet Ben’s family.  
As soon as he’s standing face to face with Dean again, everything around them stops. He sees only Dean and the hazy memories he’s been trying to grasp for years.  
“ _Dean_?”  
He asks it quietly, and the way his voice forms the word begs for some kind of clarity in the sea of strange and empty that is his life.  
“ _Sam_?” Dean answers back, his voice just as uncertain.

But there’s something there; something stronger.

The silence stretches for endless moments as they each stare, lost.  
Until one word breaks through the haze.

_Brothers._

* * *

The world dissolves around them as the bright sun is overtaken with the dark of night.  
And suddenly, he’s a baby again, and mom— _mom_ —is standing over him, holding a tiny version of Dean.  
She lets him down, and Dean rushes to the crib, gives Sam a kiss on the forehead, and whispers a quiet _Love you, Sammy_. 

* * *

This time, everything goes right. 

* * *


End file.
